Devil is in the detail. He said it'd be free is it takes longer than 100 days after the contract's signed - but a) how much does it cost if he DOES get it done on time, and b) he doesn't even now what he's quoting for, how the hell can he be guaranteeing he'll do it in any set time period/ And c), in the long run, the SA power grid needs to be part of an integrated national network so intermittent solar/wind in one region can be compensated for by power generated in other regions, and what would need to be installed in SA has to be compatible with that.

Is Musk an expert in the SA power grid and the NEM? I doubt it. I suspect he knows full well that he can make a big call like this cos he knows he won't get called on it, and even if he does, he can drag out contract negotiations basically indefinitely re price and deliverables so it'll never go ahead and he won't be the one who gets the blame for it.

Make no mistake, I'd love to see something like this happen as part of an integrated national power grid designed for a renewable power future, and the SA govt, fed govt, and AEMO would be negligent if they're not at least sounding him out about it, but this smells a bit like a publicity ploy to me.

Scott Pruitt, Donald Trump’s head of the US Environmental Protection Agency, has dismissed a basic scientific understanding of climate change by denying that carbon dioxide emissions are a primary cause of global warming.

Pruitt said on Thursday that he did not believe that the release of CO2, a heat-trapping gas, was pushing global temperatures upwards.

“I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see,” he told CNBC.

“But we don’t know that yet ... We need to continue the debate and continue the review and the analysis.”

This stance puts Pruitt at odds with his own agency, which states on its website that carbon dioxide is the “primary greenhouse gas that is contributing to recent climate change”. This finding is backed by Nasa, which calls CO2 “the most important long-lived ‘forcing’ of climate change”.

Scientists have understood for more than a century that CO2 traps heat. Atmospheric concentrations of the gas have increased by more than a third since the industrial revolution, driven by the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report from 2014, which summarized the findings of 2,000 international scientists, states it is “extremely likely” that the steep rise in CO2, along with other greenhouse gases such as methane, has caused most of the global warming experienced since the 1950s.

Pruitt’s comments were quickly condemned by scientists, environmental activists and even his immediate predecessor as EPA chief, Gina McCarthy.

“The world of science is about empirical evidence, not beliefs,” said McCarthy, an appointee of Barack Obama. “When it comes to climate change, the evidence is robust and overwhelmingly clear that the cost of inaction is unacceptably high.

“I cannot imagine what additional information the administrator might want from scientists for him to understand that.”

Kevin Trenberth, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said: “Pruitt has demonstrated that he is unqualified to run the EPA or any agency. There is no doubt whatsoever that the planet is warming, and it is primarily due to increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from burning of fossil fuels.

“Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and we can demonstrate clearly that the observed warming of the planet would not have occurred without that change in atmospheric composition. These are scientific facts, not opinion, and it is incumbent on politicians to take account of the scientific evidence.”

Pruitt has previously equivocated on the issue of climate change, telling his Senate confirmation hearing that while he accepts the world is warming it is “hard to measure with precision” the human influence.

A core EPA function is the regulation of greenhouse gases, including CO2. Pruitt, in his previous role as attorney general of Oklahoma, sued the EPA to halt Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which imposes emissions limits on coal-fired power plants.

The plan, similar to many of the other Obama-era policies to combat climate change and safeguard clean air and water, is likely to be dismantled by the Trump administration. The president has previously called the EPA a “disgrace” and promised to reduce it to “tidbits” in order to spark economic growth.

The EPA faces severe cuts under a proposed White House budget proposal, with Pruitt set to review the agency’s role in vehicle emissions standards, methane emissions and protection of America’s waterways.

Pruitt sued the EPA 14 times while attorney general of Oklahoma and has worked in concert with fossil fuel interests in many of these cases. The recent release of thousands of Pruitt’s emails during his tenure showed an extremely close relationship between Pruitt’s office and oil and gas companies.

The EPA administrator has insisted that the regulator does work that could be delegated to the states, has overreached and needs to be reined in.

“There are a lot of changes that need to take place at my agency to restore the rule of law and federalism,” Pruitt said last month.

Scott Pruitt, Donald Trump’s head of the US Environmental Protection Agency, has dismissed a basic scientific understanding of climate change by denying that carbon dioxide emissions are a primary cause of global warming.

Pruitt said on Thursday that he did not believe that the release of CO2, a heat-trapping gas, was pushing global temperatures upwards.

“I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see,” he told CNBC.

“But we don’t know that yet ... We need to continue the debate and continue the review and the analysis.”

This stance puts Pruitt at odds with his own agency, which states on its website that carbon dioxide is the “primary greenhouse gas that is contributing to recent climate change”. This finding is backed by Nasa, which calls CO2 “the most important long-lived ‘forcing’ of climate change”.

Scientists have understood for more than a century that CO2 traps heat. Atmospheric concentrations of the gas have increased by more than a third since the industrial revolution, driven by the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report from 2014, which summarized the findings of 2,000 international scientists, states it is “extremely likely” that the steep rise in CO2, along with other greenhouse gases such as methane, has caused most of the global warming experienced since the 1950s.

Pruitt’s comments were quickly condemned by scientists, environmental activists and even his immediate predecessor as EPA chief, Gina McCarthy.

“The world of science is about empirical evidence, not beliefs,” said McCarthy, an appointee of Barack Obama. “When it comes to climate change, the evidence is robust and overwhelmingly clear that the cost of inaction is unacceptably high.

“I cannot imagine what additional information the administrator might want from scientists for him to understand that.”

Kevin Trenberth, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said: “Pruitt has demonstrated that he is unqualified to run the EPA or any agency. There is no doubt whatsoever that the planet is warming, and it is primarily due to increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from burning of fossil fuels.

“Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and we can demonstrate clearly that the observed warming of the planet would not have occurred without that change in atmospheric composition. These are scientific facts, not opinion, and it is incumbent on politicians to take account of the scientific evidence.”

Pruitt has previously equivocated on the issue of climate change, telling his Senate confirmation hearing that while he accepts the world is warming it is “hard to measure with precision” the human influence.

A core EPA function is the regulation of greenhouse gases, including CO2. Pruitt, in his previous role as attorney general of Oklahoma, sued the EPA to halt Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which imposes emissions limits on coal-fired power plants.

The plan, similar to many of the other Obama-era policies to combat climate change and safeguard clean air and water, is likely to be dismantled by the Trump administration. The president has previously called the EPA a “disgrace” and promised to reduce it to “tidbits” in order to spark economic growth.

The EPA faces severe cuts under a proposed White House budget proposal, with Pruitt set to review the agency’s role in vehicle emissions standards, methane emissions and protection of America’s waterways.

Pruitt sued the EPA 14 times while attorney general of Oklahoma and has worked in concert with fossil fuel interests in many of these cases. The recent release of thousands of Pruitt’s emails during his tenure showed an extremely close relationship between Pruitt’s office and oil and gas companies.

The EPA administrator has insisted that the regulator does work that could be delegated to the states, has overreached and needs to be reined in.

“There are a lot of changes that need to take place at my agency to restore the rule of law and federalism,” Pruitt said last month.

“I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see,” he told CNBC.

This is absolutely classic denialist tactics. Absolutely classic. So that future generations know who to blame, this should be framed and put in a museum - one that is well above sea level and not vulnerable to bushfires.

"It's complicated so nobody knows the truth about whether CO2 is responsible" (false)"People argue about it so nobody knows the truth about whether CO2 is responsible" (false)"Nobody knows the truth about whether CO2 is responsible so CO2 is not responsible" (false, and wtf?)

However, it IS noticeable that even this slimeball (he's spent a huge chunk of his career suing the EPA on behalf of polluters, now he's in charge of it) has given up on claiming that the world is not warming. No more bullshit about "no warming since1998" or "the warming pause" and so on. Even he can't deny reality that far.

They delivered a similar thing in California for an 80mw storage system a little while ago and his brother is out hear talking about and looking at it right now, I'm tipping his brother has let him know the situation and has said it's doable.

The LNP have nothing. There's an energy crisis and their climate and coal woo isn't even cutting it with business anymore. If it wasn't for the right wing media they'd be getting aboneded even more. Going to be an interesting couple of years.

Our new study improves estimates of the rate of ocean warming - a critical component of climate change

New research has convincingly quantified how much the Earth has warmed over the past 56 years. Human activities utilize fossil fuels for many beneficial purposes but have an undesirable side effect of adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere at ever-increasing rates. That increase - of over 40%, with most since 1980 - traps heat in the Earth’s system, warming the entire planet.

But how fast is the Earth warming and how much will it warm in the future? Those are the critical questions we need to answer if we are going to make smart decisions on how to handle this issue.

At any time the direct effect of this blanket is small, but the accumulated effects are huge and have consequences for our weather and climate. Over 90% of the extra heat ends up in the ocean and hence perhaps the most important measurements of global warming are made in the oceans.

But measuring the ocean temperature is not straightforward. Since about 2005 a new type of sensing device has been deployed (the Argo float system). These floats (approximately 3500 in total at any time) are spread out across oceans where they autonomously rise and fall in the ocean waters, collecting temperature data to depths of 2000 meters.

When they rise to the ocean surface, they send their data wirelessly to satellites for later analysis. Hence we can now map the ocean heat content quite well. But what about the past, when we mainly had measurements from expendable bathythermographs deployed mainly along major shipping routes and largely confined to the northern hemisphere? Putting data from these various sensors together has been a struggle and has been a major impediment to an accurate quantification of the ocean’s temperature history.

Fortunately, a paper just published today in Science Advances uses a new strategy to improve upon our understanding of ocean heating to estimate the total global warming from 1960 to 2015. I was fortunate to co-author the study, which uses several innovative steps to make improvements.

First, we corrected past data for known biases in measurements. Second, we related the temperature measurements to results calculated from advanced climate computer models. Third, we applied temperature knowledge to larger areas so that a single measurement was representative of a large space around the measurement site. Finally, we used their knowledge of recent and well-observed temperatures to show that the method produced excellent results.

We were able to extend our techniques back to the late1950s and show that the rate of global warming has changed significantly in the past 60 years. One main outcome of the study is that it shows we are warming about 13% faster than we previously thought. Not only that but the warming has accelerated. The warming rate from 1992 is almost twice as great as the warming rate from 1960. Moreover, it is only since about 1990 that the warming has penetrated to depths below about 700 meters.

Prior work by the same team compared climate models to measurements, and there was excellent agreement on average. There are a few other more subtle issues that the new paper addresses. For example, the study shows that a large amount of warming occurred in the southern oceans. Only recently have the Atlantic and Indian Oceans began to heat up.

Lead author, Lijing Cheng says:

We know that ocean observations were very sparse until the Argo era. There were major gaps in data, particularly in the Southern Hemisphere. Our challenge was to assess the changes to global ocean heat and fill data gaps. A major issue is to ensure gap-filling is reliable. It is this issue that motivated the study. We proposed an advance gap-filling strategy and used it to attain near global coverage. We rigorously evaluated the reliability of our approach and as a result, we have much higher confidence that the ocean and the Earth are warming at a faster rate than previously thought.

One of the co-authors, John Fasullo added:

This study shows that more heat is likely to have been absorbed by the oceans over the past 50 years than had previously been reported. With upward revisions in our estimates of the climate’s sensitivity to greenhouse gases and the associated resultant sea level rise.

Our team’s press release noted:

we know the oceans are much warmer now and they contain the memory of climate change. Higher sea surface temperatures are continually reinforced by the extra heat beneath the ocean surface. The oceans are affecting weather and climate through more intense rains. This process is a major reason why 2016 was the hottest year ever recorded at the Earth’s surface, beating out 2015 which was the previous record. Additionally 2015 was a year with record hurricanes, heat waves, droughts, and wild-fires around the world.

The knowledge about how the ocean has warmed, and how the warmth has spread in depth and over the different oceans is consistent with theory and models, and grounds the theories of human-induced climate change. The memory of past warming is in the oceans, and even though there are weather events that alter the details daily, the atmosphere above the oceans is warmer and moister than it used to be.

It is these changes that affect storms, such as the deluges that have recently affected California, or which have led storms to produce “thousand year floods” as has been seen in the Carolinas with Hurricane Matthew, or the Louisiana floods in August last year, or the Houston floods in April, and so forth. This kind of knowledge and understanding has profound consequences.

Was kind of a dig at those who immediately scoff about renewable projects being too expensive but are strangely quiet about certain defense spending and things like the idea of building new coal plants.